Daley Remembered as Last of the Big-City Bosses

By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

Published: April 21, 2005

Outside Chicago, the image of Mayor Richard J. Daley that comes to mind is one of a flushed, jowly old man on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in 1968, shaking his finger and cursing at the rostrum while his police force manhandled demonstrators on the streets.

But here, on the 50th anniversary of his first swearing-in as mayor, many remember him as a powerful leader who single-handedly created, as the slogan went, ''the city that works.''

They see his legacy as the modern Chicago with the towering skyscrapers and the Miracle Mile, with the airport that is one of the busiest in the world, with the restored waterfront, with wide expressways, clean streets and compact neighborhoods, and with a city spirit that hardly exists elsewhere.

And they recall him as the devoted father whose eldest son, Richard M. Daley, has been mayor since 1989, sits in his father's old office on the fifth floor of City Hall and runs the city with more of a velvet glove but with no less skill than his father had.

It was they -- the late mayor's family and friends, his political sidekicks and prot?s, historians and journalists who have a favorable view of him -- who gathered to celebrate the anniversary of his swearing-in and to tell stories about Daley, the last of the big-city bosses and one of the most powerful local officials in American history, who was 74 when he died in office in 1976. They met and spoke at the Chicago Historical Society on Tuesday night, at a daylong symposium on Wednesday at the University of Illinois-Chicago and at a banquet on Wednesday night.

There were occasional disparaging words -- a fleeting mention of the political graft that the mayor had tolerated, a little talk about how his views on social issues were behind the times.

But those blemishes were quickly covered, and people who saw Daley as an autocrat who controlled a corrupt political system, thwarted democracy and left a city as racially divided as any in the country were excluded from the week's activities and would have to hold their breaths for another occasion.

Often, said the historian Michael Beschloss, a Chicago native, it takes 30 years or so of hindsight to judge what is important about a public figure. It can now be seen, Mr. Beschloss said, that Daley's shortcomings were transient and that his main legacy is that he was ''the pre-eminent mayor of the 20th century.''

Elizabeth Taylor, who with Adam Cohen wrote ''American Pharaoh,'' the biography of Daley published in 2000, said, ''Because of Mayor Daley, Chicago did not become a Detroit or a Cleveland.''

When those cities and others were going under in the 1960's and 1970's, said Robert Remini, emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois-Chicago, ''Chicago always had a double-A bond rating.''

What is now seen as Daley's greatest public works disaster, the building of high-rise public housing complexes that turned into dangerous, teeming slums and the sites of flaming urban riots, was the result, the panelists agreed, of the best motives.

The millions of poor blacks who migrated to Chicago from the South after World War II were living in squalor, and housing experts at the time, the panelists said, told the mayor that the best solution was to bulldoze the shacks and erect high-rise buildings.

The consensus, this anniversary week, was that Daley's biggest mistake was his mishandling of the 1968 convention, but there was general agreement with former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, who said, ''People were so angry, so resentful of the establishment, there was nothing he could do.''

But for all the serious talk, it was the stories of Daley's contemporaries that carried the day. Newton N. Minow, the Chicago lawyer who was the mayor's ally and adviser, told how Daley, in one fell swoop, changed dozens of laws and regulations that were stifling the growth of the Adler Planetarium here, and allowed it to become one of the most prominent in the world.

Former Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III described how Daley showed up uninvited at his home in Libertyville, Ill., when Mr. Stevenson and other political reformers were plotting ways to strangle the Daley machine.

Former Representative Dan Rostenkowski, Daley's man in Congress for years, recalled attending a meeting in the Oval Office in 1966 when Daley implored President Lyndon Johnson to ''get out of Vietnam.'' After the meeting, Mr. Rostenkowski said, Daley, ever loyal, went outside and told the press he supported the president on Vietnam.

''He respected the presidency,'' Mr. Rostenkowski said.

There was much talk of how Daley was responsible for John F. Kennedy's carrying Illinois, the crucial swing state, in the 1960 presidential election. Mr. Rostenkowski said it was ''a bunch of baloney'' that, as legend has it, the mayor stole the election for Kennedy with votes from the graveyard.

But the politicians and historians here agreed that the torchlight parade for Kennedy that the mayor led down Michigan Avenue four days before the election turned the tide in Kennedy's favor.

After the election, Mr. Rostenkowski recalled, Daley was ''so proud the buttons popped off his shirt that John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, was president of the United States.''

Photos: Mayor Richard J. Daley, above, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. He was seated directly below the rostrum in a position of honor, but it was also ground zero in a year of political and social upheaval. At left, Daley's son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, seated between his wife, Maggie, and the historian Michael Beschloss, a Chicago native, attended the inaugural Richard J. Daley Urban Forum yesterday at the University of Illinois-Chicago. (Photo by Associated Press); (Photo by Peter Thompson for The New York Times)